The Fire Boy

Leo was fifteen when he arrived on Block Island, which was approximately the same age he had been every day of his life. His Italian grandmother had said, "Go. Work. Stop asking questions." So he went, and he worked, and he tried not to ask questions about the old Italian man who lived on a rock outside the island and came back from the water at dawn smelling like a volcano.

Giovanni was tall and thin and moved with the economy of a man who had already done all the moving he intended to do. His hands were burned on the knuckles, the burns old and silvered, like scars from a war Leo couldn't imagine.

"You lift," Giovanni said on the first day. "You carry. You don't ask where we're going until after breakfast."

Leo lifted. He carried the two iron pails of dark oil down to the water's edge every morning at three, before the sky was fully awake. He didn't see Giovanni light anything. He wasn't allowed to. But he saw what came back: Giovanni, soaking wet and shaking, his clothes steaming in the cold morning air, his eyes black as coal and twice as bright.

"Today," Leo said on the fourteenth morning. "I want to come today."

Giovanni looked at him for a long time. The island was gray around them, the water dark as ink, the sky a pale bruise opening in the east.

"Today," Giovanni said finally. "But you carry. I'll show you how."

The walk to the eastern shore took twenty minutes through fog so thick Leo could barely see his own boots. When they reached the water, Giovanni knelt and began pouring the oil along something Leo couldn't see—a line, maybe, or a groove, or a wound in the stone.

"You watch," Giovanni said. "You don't touch. You don't look. You watch."

Giovanni struck a match.

Leo looked.

The flame was not yellow. It was blue-white, the color of a welding torch, and it spread along the oil line like a fuse, fast and silent, until the horizon caught fire and the sky cracked open and the sun came up the way a fist comes up through water—slow, inevitable, and impossibly bright.

Leo fell to his knees. Not from the heat. From the sheer fact of it: the sun was real. It was not a ball of gas or a nuclear reactor or any of the things Mr. Harrison at school had tried to explain with chalk diagrams. It was something that needed to be lit. Something that would go dark if nobody was there to light it. Something that had been counting on Giovanni—and now, apparently, on him—for as long as anyone could remember.

"Every morning?" Leo asked. His voice was small. The sound of it surprised him.

"Every morning," Giovanni said.

Leo went back to the mainland and waited. He helped Mr. Sullivan with his garden. He mowed lawns. He saved every dollar in a coffee tin under his bed. At eighteen, he had enough to buy a boat. At nineteen, he sailed to Block Island.

Giovanni was waiting at the jetty. He didn't smile. He didn't need to. He handed Leo a set of keys and a small leather journal and walked away without looking back, which was the most loving thing a man like Giovanni could do.

Leo opened the journal. The entries went back forty years. Every morning. Every sunrise. Every day a new name written at the top: Leo. Leo. Leo. Until the last page, where Giovanni had written his own name in handwriting so shaky Leo couldn't read it at first.

The next morning, Leo carried the two iron pails down to the water at three. The fog was thick. The sky was a pale bruise. He was shaking.

But when the horizon caught fire and the sun came up like a fist through water, Leo didn't fall to his knees. He stood straight and watched it, and the light made his eyes black as coal and twice as bright.

================================================================================